A La Cards: Big Butterfly Congrats

Happy Wednesday! Have you missed me? Sorry I've been AWOL the past few days...I am up to my eyeballs in end-of-year marking, exams, report cards and clean-up at school. I can't wait for Friday at 3:00...ahhhh freedom!!
With the end of the school year come the requisite good-byes as we say farewell to various staff members who are leaving for a variety of reasons. I am typically charged with making the cards for everyone to sign, which means I need to think BIG! Today's project is an over-sized 5-1/2" x 8" retirement card...

Retirement card featuring the Watercolour Wings and Awesomely Artistic stamp sets with sentiment from Sassy Salutations

For this one I pulled out two of my favourite new stamp sets: Watercolour Wings and Awesomely Artistic. I also used the Bokeh technique to create my background. I began by sponging Whisper White card stock all over with Lost Lagoon, Wisteria Wonder and Mint Macaron inks. I really like the way those three shades blend and complement each other. Then I used Whisper White Craft ink and a template I created with various-sized circle punches to create my points of light. Once that was completely dry, I heat embossed the floral image from the Awesomely Artistic stamp set in silver. Such a gorgeously delicate imge! The final touch on the background was some silver ink spatters, which are also from the Awesomely Artistic set.

I layered my Bokeh background on a piece of Lost Lagoon card stock, on which I had heat embossed, in silver, the sentiment from Sassy Salutations and embellished it with some (retired) Blackberry Bliss stitched satin ribbon. To create the butterflies, I stamped the solid butterfly images from the Watercolour Wings stamp set in Wisteria Wonder ink and then stamped the detail images in Blackberry Bliss. I die-cut the stamped butterflies using the Bold Butterfly Framelits and Butterflies Thinlits. The top layer on each butterfly is die-cut from Dazzling Diamonds Glimmer paper (on sale this week!). I embellished each butterfly with a Vintage Faceted button (also on sale this week!) and some Silver Metallic Thread.
The background panel is a piece of Blackberry Bliss card stock that I embossed using the Elegant Dots TIEF. The panel was larger than would fit in the folder, but I was able to carefully match the pattern so that the seam wasn't obvious. The card base is Basic Gray card stock.

Inside view with sentiment from the Wild About Flowers set and butterfly images from the Papillon Potpourri set.

On the inside I added Whisper White panels to allow lots of room for our staff to wish the retiree well and then added some stamped flowers in Blacknerry Bliss. The sentiment is from the Wild About Flowers set and is heat embossed in silver. I die cut the labels using the Lots of Labels framelits. The butterflies, from the Papillon Potpourri set, are heat embossed in silver on vellum and then punched using the Bitty Butterfly and Elegant Butterfly punches.

Now, I was so busy yesterday I fogot to post this week's Weekly Deals! Here they are...prices are good until Monday at midnight :)